Department Collection

Keats, Ode to the Nightingale

Autographs and Archives

The Fitzwilliam Museum preserves autographs by some
of the best-known names in literature, music, science,
and art. These include Isaac Newton’s notebook, the Ode to a Nightingale in
Keats’ own hand, Thomas Hardy’s manuscript of Jude the
Obscure, and Virginia Woolf’s draft of A Room of One’s
Own; letters by Charles Darwin, Charlotte Brontë, William Blake,
Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Horatio Nelson, and Queen Victoria; and the
massive archives of Edward Burne-Jones and John Linnell, William Blake’s
last great patron.

Examples

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Notebook
1665-1668

Celebrated as the ‘father’ of modern science,
Newton is less well known as a theologian. His
private life remains
a mystery. Perhaps often carried in his pocket
while at Trinity College, Cambridge,
this notebook preserves his thoughts on optics
together with the sums he spent on laundry and the confession
of past sins he could remember
in 1662. This little booklet brings together the
scientist, the believer, and the every-day man.
Presented by the Friends of the Fitzwilliam
Museum,
with the aid of a grant from Sir Thomas Barlow,
1936
MS 1-1936

John Keats (1795-1821)
Autograph manuscript of Ode to a Nightingale
1819

One of the best-loved poems ever composed in English survives in its
original draft, written by Keats on two sheets of scrap
paper. His friend Charles Brown recalled how Keats sat in his garden
in Hampstead on a
beautiful spring morning and, moved by the song of
a nightingale nesting nearby, wrote the lyrics within a few hours. The
hastily penned lines
recapture the moment of inspiration and spontaneous
creativity as experienced by one of the greatest Romantic poets.
Presented
by the Marques of Crewe, 1933.
MS 1-1933

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Jude the Obscure
c.1894

Thomas Hardy’s best-known work was also his last novel. Jude the
Obscure was a turning point in his career. Its dark, fateful pessimism
unleashed the critics’ hostility and persuaded Hardy to abandon
prose for poetry. He presented the original manuscript of the novel,
as well as one of his eight volumes of verse, Time’s Laughingstocks,
to the Fitzwilliam Museum whose Director, Sydney
Cockerell, he had befriended.
Presented by the author, 1911
MS 1-1911

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Autograph manuscript of A Room of One’s Own
1929

Widely acclaimed as one of the most innovative novelists
of twentieth-century modernism, Virginia Woolf
was also a literary critic, journalist, and
social thinker with a powerful voice in contemporary
debates. As a founding member of the Bloomsbury
Group, the circle of intellectuals that met
in her London home, she spoke and wrote against the
Victorian prejudices of class and gender. Based
on her lectures ‘Women and Fiction’,
A Room of One’s Own became a feminist classic, predicting a future
for women-writers and poets, free from social, financial, and educational
prejudices. Woolf’s learned and elegant, but accessible prose,
is the best advocate for the dialogue she proposed between the intellectual
and the audiences. Her concern for high standards of education in a world
of mass-produced culture and her belief that the general public could
share ‘highbrow’ culture remain relevant today.
Presented
by Leonard Woolf, 1942.
MS 1-1942

William Blake (1757-1827)

At the Fitzwilliam Museum, William Blake can be studied in all his complexity,
as an artist, as a poet, and as a mystical philosopher. The collections
represent the full range of his creative genius, from paintings, watercolours,
drawings, and engravings to illuminated books, poetry, and letters.

John Linnell (1792-1882)

A distinguished portraitist and landscape painter, John Linnell
was one of the most successful artists of his day.
He was also William Blake’s
last major patron and his journals and cash-books are crucial in understanding
Blake’s final years. Linnell built up an impressive network of
connections with fellow artists, sitters, art dealers,
suppliers, and prominent private collectors. They
all speak through his private papers
and correspondence, an impressive archive of over
17,000 items and a treasury of information on the nineteenth-century
art world.

Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898)

The leading figure of the later Pre-Raphaelite movement, Burne-Jones
became the most sought-after European painter of the 1880s. In addition
to important examples of his art works, the Fitzwilliam Museum preserves
rich archival materials on his professional and private life, as well
as on his friends and collaborators. Like William Morris, the founder
of the Arts and Crafts movement, Burne-Jones crossed the boundaries between
fine and decorative art, designing jewellery, furniture, stained glass,
and stage costumes. His pass-books record his collaboration with Morris
and their life-long friendship is reflected in the amusing, good-natured
caricatures.